


Heat

by nostalgia



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Alien Biology, F/M, aliens that go into heat, or something like that
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-10
Updated: 2014-07-10
Packaged: 2018-02-08 05:34:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 973
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1928526
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nostalgia/pseuds/nostalgia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Their people ritualised everything but now the books are dust and nothing matters except each other.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Heat

They explore each other as though trying to find a secret, learning new bodies with barely a thought to it. Their people ritualised everything but now the books are dust and nothing matters except each other.

He wants to crawl under her skin. He licks sweat from it, grazes it with his teeth, breathes in its scent.

\-- 

"Little is known about the mating habits of the Time Lords. All sorts of salacious rumours can be found in cheap paperbacks or unsubstantiated downloads, but the truth is far more difficult to ascertain.

"What is known is that Time Lords are on the whole reserved when around others. Less demonstrative than younger species, they seem quite capable of concealing and perhaps even controlling their emotional responses"

\--

In the restaurant, he licks dripped wine from her wrist and they pretend that they can't speak any language but their own. She and the words taste of home, and his blood rushes to answer hers. They edge closer until denial becomes pointless and her fingers work his tie off before the food arrives.

No one watches, no one cares. No one understands what they'd be seeing if they looked at the couple in the corner.

\--

"I heard they knit their babies from string."

\--

They are the entire species and as such they define it. Time Lords are a careless people, defined by biology and driven by lust. They mate loudly and eagerly, eons of breeding and manipulation deployed merely to unite remixed genes.

They think themselves perfect and beautiful creatures, and think not of responsibility but of how there should be more of them. Dozens, hundreds, millions. There are only two, functioning as single being, merging and dividing over and over.

\--

His hand slides to her wrist, feels her heartsbeat under the skin.

\--

"You realise, of course, that it'd be entirely possible for the two of us to populate a new planet."

He remembers that he is supposed to be looking for Martha. "If we did nothing else."

"I didn't say we should." She laces her fingers with his, unconscious instinct.

Her eyes are green-brown like the oceans of their home. He tries not to dive into them, and fails.

\--

He is seventeen years old and his best friend is suddenly beautiful. They lie in red grass and kiss and touch until the second sun sets.

It will be centuries before they try to kill each other.

\--

When they are home, in the TARDIS, they will be well-behaved and tender. He tells himself this as he slides her skirt to her waist and lifts her against a hotel wall. They mumble out excuses until the words are nothing more than lips on skin and neither can spare the effort to believe their own lies.

There is no one to tell them how to act, no one to make them perform a fiction.

Time Lords are suddenly honest.

\--

His is not angry, or sad, or any of the feelings that nag insistently at the back of his mind. He is inside her and she is the only thing in the universe that matters. They need to be closer, closer still, he needs to move her like so and find the double-pulse here and let his tongue just taste.

\--

They tire, but do not separate. Each was alone for far too long, and their bodies are still acting on impulse. They become playful and loving through sheer exhaustion, a parody of the past that becomes a definition for the species.

Here lies Gallifrey, post-coital.

\--

He outlives all his children, and never shares their names with anyone.

\--

They lose track of casuality, play with time simply because they can. He touches her skin with an echo, teases her with three seconds into the future. They spend eternity in a telepathic feedback loop and she slithers, quantum, over him.

\--

He wants to tell her everything, wants to talk about the war and the Daleks and things he's thought about saying since she left him the first time. About people he's met and places he's been and that none of it was her fault, really.

He wants to touch her.

\--

"They're just so... alien."

\--

"I didn't think," he says, "I'm sorry."

Martha listens to his hearts, pours water into a glass. "Survival isn't supposed to kill you."

"It didn't."

\--

"Can't stop."

"Don't."

\--

Inside the magic box they are home. The machine-beast buzzes and sparks and glows inside. It thinks there should be more of them, silently reshuffles and expands. It finds the hollow space it set aside for its own child and settles for donating it to theirs.

They are wasting energy, it thinks. There are already three of them.

\--

Animals are complex in their simplicity. His hearts pick up speed when they recognise compatibility, he drowns in the scent of pheromones that are no longer extinct. One plus one equals more than two, the arithmetic of multicellular organisms.

His blood says merge, and his hand brings her wrist to his lips.

\--

"Whether this is biology, culture, or mere pretense is the subject of rather fierce academic debate. With Gallifrey unwilling to offer much information on anatomy - understandable given certain unique abilities - even most textbooks are given to unfounded speculation."

\--

"Do your lot go into heat?" she asks, and he winces as the light in her hand contracts his pupils.

"Maybe we're just machines for replicating DNA. Maybe if there's only two of you left it wakes something. Something old and hungry and desperate to survive."

She is clinical, deliberately detached. "What's normal mating behaviour in your species?"

"I don't think it's the same as it was when there were more of us."

\--

She presses him down and moves, demanding. Hot and flush against each other, they sigh their own language and remake their world once more.

\-- 

And on and on and on...


End file.
